Here, the AIDS dissident John Lauritsen looks at one piece of ridicule in particular, and questions why he was not allowed to write a reasoned reply in a British humanist publication.

Profits of the “AIDS industry” run into many billions of dollars every year. When AIDS dissidents speak up, they are ridiculed with often ad hominem arguments. Here, the AIDS dissident John Lauritsen looks at one piece of ridicule in particular, and questions why he was not allowed to write a reasoned reply in a British humanist publication.

According to the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I’d add that, even before ridicule, truth will be ignored or censored, especially if powerful political-economic interests are involved. There is a German word for this: Todschweigen (to kill off through silence).

For over a quarter of a century there have been critics of the orthodox AIDS paradigm, the HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis. We call ourselves “AIDS dissidents” or “AIDS critics” or “AIDS realists”. We have experienced every imaginable form of censorship and ridicule, and now, as our ranks have grown, violent opposition, which almost always attacks our persons, not our ideas.

Dr Mark Wainberg, president of the International AIDS Society, has called for jailing AIDS dissidents, whom he calls “HIV deniers” (his explicit analogy to “Holocaust deniers”). John P Moore of Cornell University advocates even more violent measures, stating, “This is a war, there are no rules, and we will crush you, one at a time, completely and utterly (at least the more influential ones; foot-soldiers like you aren’t worth bothering with).” (Letter from John P Moore, PhD to AIDS dissident Michael Geiger, 27 January 2007.)

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Conspiracies do exist

Of course, conspiracies do exist. In business or in politics, they are part of the game. While denying the conspiracies in which we AIDS critics allegedly believe, Kalichman seems to believe that we ourselves form some sort of conspiracy. Using stealth tactics and the pseudonym of “Joseph (Joe) C Newton” to penetrate our ranks, he ingratiated himself with some of us (not me), professing to greatly admire our work. This was pointless, as we have nothing to hide and our ideas are readily available. Kalichman seems particularly proud of his incognito relationship with Peter Duesberg: on Page 27 of his book is a photo of himself next to Duesberg.

The ugliest ad hominem tactic used by Kalichman and others of his ilk is to gloat over the deaths of a few AIDS dissidents, arguing speciously that their deaths were caused by HIV, and they would have lived longer had they taken “anti-HIV” drugs. Without going into personal details, I can say that in every case there were health risks in their lives, having nothing to do with viruses, which could explain why they died.

What about the hundreds of thousands of people, in the United States alone, who died while taking “anti-HIV” drugs? Did the drugs kill them? What about the prominent advocates of AZT therapy who have died in the past two decades? Did guilt cause them to develop cancer or succumb to organ failure? Consider the recent death of Stephen Lagakos, who co-authored a bogus study (Paul Volberding, Stephen Lagakos et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 5 April 1990), which advocated giving AZT to asymptomatic HIV-positives. Driving on the highway in October 2009, Lagakos suddenly veered over into the lane of oncoming traffic, killing himself, his mother, his wife and the man in the other car. Was Lagakos killed by an Avenging Conscience? Why not? The conjecture is, if anything, just as rational as the conjecture that AIDS-dissidents were killed by a retrovirus.